


that sings in me no more

by nextgreatadventure



Category: Sanctuary (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-05-20
Updated: 2011-05-20
Packaged: 2017-10-19 15:48:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,284
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/202530
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nextgreatadventure/pseuds/nextgreatadventure
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Her heart skips at the sound, catches fire once more, and burns, burns, burns.</p>
            </blockquote>





	that sings in me no more

**Author's Note:**

> first Sanctuary fic. let's say this is set around mid-season 2.

\--

 

 

__

I cannot say what loves have come and gone;  
 I only know that summer sang in me   
A little while, that sings in me no more.  
                             -edna st.vincent millay

 

 

 

 

 

 Sometimes, Helen Magnus dreams of fire, a burn that envelops and caresses like a lover, whispers to her of her own mortality – and a reminder: these precious things you hold so dear? You cannot keep them forever.

 And she burns.

 

 

She wakes covered in sweat and finds a glass of cool water in the kitchen, wondering what it will feel like when her luck runs out, when time catches up, when she’s finally conquered.

Thing is, she isn’t upset – these tears are running down her face because while she burns all she feels is relief.

She wakes in the morning and proceeds to slowly live while everything else around her proceeds to slowly die.

 

 

 

 There’s Will, and he’s looking into her eyes like she’s the only puzzle he’s never been able to figure out.

“It’s nothing,” she says to him. “Sometimes I just…begin to feel my age.” And she smiles, even though he doesn’t buy it and they both know it, standing, hardly breathing in the stinging silence of the laboratory.

“Magnus,” he says with that concern in his voice, all that concern that’s only for her and will only ever be for her because she’s Helen and he’s Will and she’s given him everything he never knew he wanted but there’s something else, too. A dip and an ache like she’s finally about to tumble off that cliff and he’s planning on going right down with her.

Her heart skips at the sound, catches fire once more, and burns, burns, burns. “I’m fine.”

The conversation is over.

 

 

 

 “So you really watched me since I was eight?"

“Mm,” she nods. He’s re-filling her wine glass and picking up this game they play sometimes, the one where he hides how implicitly he adores her by asking her innocent questions and she responds with sweeping, incredible statements in that nonchalant voice.

It’s far past any self-respecting sleeping hour and the files atop her desk haven’t been touched even though they both vowed that’s what they came up here to do.  


Work can wait a little longer.

“I never asked, what’s…I mean, what is that like? Seeing me here now, after all this time?”

Helen moves her jaw in a funny, unsettled way – she suddenly feels very tired, very lonely, very much the alien that she is.  _Wonderful,_ she wants to tell him. _Beautiful. Familiar. You fit here, Will._

_Here, with me._

But it won’t last – nothing does (all that nothing sure can stretch for miles, though, and hurt like a slit across the throat that just won’t heal).

“It’s like exhaling,” she says finally.  _You’re special, young William,_ she thinks, and her mind has turned red with lifeblood. 

_You aren’t like the others._

_I can’t loose you, too._

 

 

He’s watching her again, wondering how long it’ll be before she lets him in.

Her doe eyes are ethereal; he thinks he can see for centuries inside of them. He wants to keep her safe like she’s kept him safe but he knows she won’t let him, and maybe it’s because she’s used to men who are more monster than human hovering over her, over-protective, patriarchal, Victorian men, and maybe it’s because she thinks she can take care of herself (maybe it’s because she  _can_ ) but maybe, just maybe, it’s because she’s afraid.

Their fingers brush when he hands the glass back to her.

 

 

 

 There was a time during a retrieval mission when Will very nearly died, more dire than all of the other “close calls” – just a hop, skip and an artful jump away from that elusive, inevitable cloaked figure and the river Styx. 

That moment rattles and replays inside Helen’s head like a stick dragging itself back and forth across a bare rib cage: hollow, taunting.

She wouldn’t speak to Will the whole way home and he was hurt and upset and confused by this – the Big Guy ruffled his hair and Henry gave him a meaningful, silent glance in the rearview while Magnus sat like steel, stoic and immovable in the back of the van.

They’d unloaded and she and Will were the last in the empty hangar. She’d started to walk away and Will grabbed her arm without even thinking, without knowing why, he just wanted to stop her, stop this downward spiral since Ashley and Druitt and everything, everything else, he wanted to ask her why she wouldn’t look at him in that way she sometimes looked at him and say “thank God you’re safe” – and she snapped. She took him completely by surprise, tugged him into her with an unyielding ferocity he’d never imagined she could possess for him.

“Please, Will—“ and her voice was a low, breathless, trembling, broken thing against his ear. “Don’t ever do that to me again.”

When he’d recovered from the shock of her words, of her warmth against his neck, of her body suddenly pressed to his like she meant it (she’d touched him before, frequently even, but never like this) – he murmured something back to her. He’d wanted so badly to say “I won’t, never again” but once upon a time she’d told him to never stop being honest with her, and so he said instead, “You know I can’t promise that, Magnus. No one can.”

 

He wrapped his arms around her and felt a visceral pull in his stomach, felt his eyelids flutter closed when her fingers went rigid, pulling slowly against his shirt collar in a lost, desperate way. “I know,” she said. “I know.”

 

 

 

 Helen finds it ironic that it takes this thirty-something-year-old man, his life a few short decades away from ending, to remind her to live.

He takes her dancing one night, to a jazz club in the city. He says it’s for her birthday, even though she barely even remembers when that is anymore (she’d tried celebrating every ten years for awhile before stopping completely, everything past 100 began to feel tedious and redundant).

They dance a little but mostly they sit in a smoky corner booth and drink the best bourbon she’s ever tasted outside New Orleans circa 1922.

He lets her talk about Ashley. He tells her not to feel guilty – about her daughter, about the things she’s done that he knows haunts her, about outliving the people she loves – but he tells her, in that kind and gentle voice, that it’s okay to be scared.

She’s needed to hear those words again like she’s needed to remember to breathe.

 

 

They’re sitting close, the music is booming, and he leans over to kiss her cheek. She turns her head just slightly at the last moment so that the corner of her mouth bumps against his. They’re not drunk enough to blame it on the bourbon.

 

 

They laugh for a long, long time after that. What they don’t do is acknowledge that her hand is on his knee and that sometimes, like inside this moment right here, somewhere between irrationality and sub-consciousness, he wants her so badly his teeth ache.

 

 Later, much later, he walks her up to her bedroom and leans against the doorframe. He says, “Just because you’re going to outlive everyone on planet Earth doesn’t mean you can’t still make mistakes. Fuck responsibility for a while, Magnus. Doctor’s orders. It’ll do you some good.”

She smiles and squeezes his hand before slipping inside, shutting the door behind her.

 

 

 

 That night she dreams of the London skyline and even though she looks for miles and miles around, there’s no fire anywhere to be found.

 

 

\--


End file.
